by Heather T. | Sep 6, 2022 | Business, Marketing
Last week I ran an online workshop about how to create a customer persona. As part of the workshop, I touched on how businesses can use the power of social media to data mine social media profiles for information, and I wanted to elaborate on it a bit.
The internet is a very scary place, and I don’t think people truly realize how much information is out there for public view.
A perfect example of this is every year when we lived in CT;
I used to run a class for the Middlesex Library, which had a jobseekers program, Social Media for Jobseekers.
Every year I would talk about how with a bit of Googling, how much information was out there online for HR, for companies, and for recruiters to be able to see without even digging that hard or violating any privacy.
In every group, I’d get at least one skeptic: “You can’t find anything out about me; I’m not on any social media channels!!!!”. And I would have them give me their name, the town they were from, and nothing else. I’d say, “Give me a minute on Google, please.”
So “Bill,” you are a long-time member of Rotary, you went to UCONN and studied meat science, you like fly fishing, and you are extremely unhappy with the customer service at XYZ brand. You love to order dog toys from Chewy, and you coach your middle school daughter’s soccer team. That’s only page one. Would you like me to continue?”
Now put that information into a persona (that’s not even including social media data mining), and that’s not even digging very hard.
- Rotary Member (likes to give back to community and volunteer)
- UCONN graduate (large college with an extensive alumni network)
- Meat Science Degree (probably currently works or formerly in the food business, probably wholesale)
- Likes flyfishing (outdoors person, likes to spend time alone (supposition)-passionate about it as found multiple flyfishing forums he belongs to
- Shops at XYZ brand quite a bit.
- Does not like bad customer service (15 bad reviews about it, 40 good reviews about positive customer service experiences)
- Has a dog or dogs
- Has at least one child (A daughter who likes to play soccer)
- He probably purchases soccer apparel for his daughter, who is in middle school and does not have the funds to purchase them herself.
Now how much more can you dig out just going past page one?
Now, let’s see what we can dig out on Social Media. A goldmine, actually many gold mines on top of the one Google gives you. Facebook is a wealth of information, and sadly (but good for businesses), not everyone has their profiles completely locked down.
I’m going to use a friend as an example; I looked at her account through the account of someone she is not friends with to see what information is public to someone logged into Facebook.
I can (publicly/logged into FB but not friends with her in this case) see that she is a creative writer, a former reporter at a local paper, she studied communications at XYZ university, she studied “partying” at another university, she went to ZYX High School, she’s married, and she currently is a costume theater designer and likes renaissance fairs (including making costumes for ren faires).
She also has some posts not set to “friends” only; she likes brewpub hopping with her husband and a large pool of friends. And she’s a board game addict.
She is from New Jersey, currently lives in Pennsylvania (Town specific), and moved there about 30 years ago.
She is also on Instagram (Insta handle provided), and she posts daily on Facebook, only about once a week on Instagram. (so Facebook would be a good target for her, but probably not Instagram. I have no idea if she is on Linkedin or Twitter (because I haven’t looked yet).
She identifies as female, a Gemini, her religious views are Buddhist, and her political stance is Progressive. She frequently shares her husband’s political posts, who is clearly not a republican or a fan of a past president.
I can also see where she’s checked in on Facebook: breweries, bookstores, national parks, cosplay conventions, ren faires, theaters, Indian restaurants, etc.
I can see what kind of movies and TV shows she has indicated she likes, as well as books and a whole lot more information.
I used a fictitious button company (The Button Store, over 5 Million Buttons!) as the business that would be building a persona based on my friend.
A real persona, if you were going to do one for a company, would include a lot more research on people and a lot more data mining of other profiles, but I wanted to use this as an easy example.
Let’s move on to the other social channels: Linkedin also has a lot of information, not just in people’s bios, but what groups they belong to, what interests they have, their backgrounds, who they are connected to, and what they post about.
Instagram and Twitter (I’m not going to include TikTok because of the primarily younger audience, and I wouldn’t UNLESS that was your target market) don’t have as much information at first glance to glean.
But you can tell who they are following, who is following them, generally if they have other social accounts, where they live, how often they post, what they post about, and in Twitter’s case, what they repost and who they converse with, etc. You can find some of that on Instagram, but it doesn’t have the native reposting option that Twitter does.
While this may seem a bit creepy, big companies do this all the time, and it doesn’t stop a small business from using the same data mining techniques. It’s just time-consuming, you are looking for information that is already public.
For small businesses and anyone who uses social media media, I would VERY much encourage people to look at what they post and the specifics of what people can see. Google yourself, too; it’s always eye-opening.
I’m not going to go on a rant about locking down everything again (done that enough in the past) ,but please be cognizant of what’s out there.
From a small business perspective, if you want to make accurate customer personas, set aside 5 or 10 minutes a day, do some Googling, check out some social profiles, and compile information. Please don’t do a generic persona, do as many as you need for your business and customize them to suit.
Hubspot has some great resources I suggest you check out if you are just starting to create personas for your business. When doing your research, don’t forget to check out people’s reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Tripadvisor, as well as any other review sources you can find. You can glean a lot about someone from their reviews.
HubSpot Resources
https://offers.hubspot.com/persona-templates
https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research
(How to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas section And 20 Questions to Ask in Persona Interviews are particularly helpful)
Some additional articles you may find useful
https://www.semrush.com/blog/buyer-persona-examples-beyond-basics/
https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide/
https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/
To use the example of “Bill” in the beginning of the post, good customer service is a sticky point for him. If you were going to use him and say 15-20 other people to create a detailed persona, what could you put in your persona to elaborate on that? And how would that make your company stand apart from the competition? Is this a person/persona that would pay more for terrific customer service? Travel further for it? Prefer to use email or phone rather than shop online for it? What can you glean from what people are telling you? Use Google and the Social Platforms out there to create your personas, don’t just make them up based on what you think should go in there.
by Heather T. | Jan 13, 2022 | Marketing, Operations
I recently had a friend ask me how to do competition research best online. I’ve also done several workshops on this prior.
Competition research or comp research is very easy to do; it’s just time-consuming and if you want to do it right (suggested!), do the time; it will be well worth it.
Step one and you can do this is a spreadsheet, or you can do it in MSWord or Google Docs. I like using a combination of both, a spreadsheet in Google Sheets for the base information and then linking it to a Google Doc with more information. I also like to take screenshots, LOTs of screenshots. Screenshots of their website, screenshots of their social media posts, as well as screenshots of reviews, both good and bad.
Some specific things I look for are an email newsletter (if so, sign up!) Do they post consistently on social media, and are they getting engagement from what they are doing (or not) if certain posts or post types are getting high engagement, screenshot them!
While on a PC you can take a full screenshot using “PrtScn” on your keyboard, I prefer the snipping tool that comes standard. It is in the Start Menu under Windows Accessories. It lets you be selective about what you snip and allows you to mark the image up.
For Mac users, instructions here on screenshots https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361
A few of the other things I look for are their reviews. Do they respond to reviews, just the bad or the good and the bad, or not at all? How are the review responses? Are they well crafted and polite and try to address the problem, or are they defensive and combative?
You can learn a lot from reading competitors’ reviews, both from their excellent reviews (these are key things your business will have to concentrate on competing with) and the bad (these are things your business can excel at and blow away the competitors). Check all the review sites, Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, BBB, etc.
Have they optimized their directory listings and their social media accounts? Do their links work? Do their links to social media channels from their website work? I’m always surprised by how many businesses don’t pay attention to this; they change their social media handle but forget to update the links on their websites.
In reviewing competitors, social media listings look at who they follow (its public to view) and who follows them. Keep an eye out for an overabundance of fake follower accounts. They are easy to spot once you start to eyeball them. You can also quickly tell if someone has a high follower/like count but zero engagement on posts. Please don’t buy followers. Yes, it is cheap to do, but it does nothing for you except inflating your following and dinging your credibility. And there is no value as a business owner for doing so.
While there are a lot of paid sites out there where you can do backlink research, my personal favorite https://www.semrush.com/ (not an affiliate link), I like the program; they generally have a free trial period that I encourage businesses with limited budgets to take advantage of. For anyone who needs to do high-level ongoing research, the pricing at $120 a month can be worth it.
You can do all of this research using a tool, but I also like doing it organically because when you search for the business in Google and Bing (and do both because you will get differing returns), you also see the snippets from the sites that are linking to your competition. It can help if you see a competitor is linked from a site that’s relevant and it’s a junk link connection, rather than one of the research tools which gives you the link.
The easiest way to do this is to go to Google and Bing and put in variations. Put the information in quotes for the best return: “Business Name” ie. “Jane Doe Inn.” If it has an LLC or other variations, Google those too. “Phone number,” ie “860-555-1212” and then their domain name. Don’t add the http/https or the www (if they include it), just the domain and the extension ending, i.e., “janedoeinn.com.”
This is a base of what I use, and then I add additional things like pricing, like services, what they offer etc.
Business Name:
Name:
Physical and Mailing Address(es):
Phone Number(s):
Email Address(s):
Domain Name: ( ie. https://www.janedoeinn.com)
Notes:
ADA Score: (I use Lighthouse for this. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse)
Notes:
SEO Score: (I use Lighthouse for this as well)
Notes:
Mobile Friendly: (Is their website? Some sites look great on a computer, not so much on a cell phone or tablet)
GMB: (this is Google My Business, add the full URL))
Reviews: (how many reviews, review rating, do they respond? Don’t forget those screenshots)
Notes:
GA Analytics: Yes/No
(this is Google Analytics, you can see if they are using it and the next note as well about Plugins by putting their domain name/url into https://builtwith.com/ . This is also useful because it will tell you what the site was built with.
Plugins if WP: (WP is WordPress, you may see some things you like on a WordPress site, like a photo slider or gallery and you can find out what plugin was used)
Blog: (add the full URL)
Followers (IA): (IA is If Available, some blogs have that public)
Notes:
Average blog post word count:
Newsletter: (what are they using? Constant Contact? Mailchimp? Other?)
Notes:
Privacy Policy: (I add yes or no but if yes add the link, same with the ADA policy)
ADA Policy: (This refers to ADA Website Compliance, add the full URL)
Covid Statement: (If yes add the full URL)
Facebook: (add the full URL, ie https://www.facebook.com/janedoeinn)
Likes:
Followers:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Facebook Ads: (You can see if a page is running or has run Facebook ads, not boosts, just ads, by scrolling down on the left hand side of a business page to “Page Transparency”. When you click on that, you can go to “Ad Library”.
Reviews: (number and comments)
Notes:
If you really want to dive deep, track down the owner’s and manager’s personal profiles, I realize this seems rather stalkerish. From a business research standpoint, most people don’t have their profiles totally locked down. You can gain some very valuable business information about what groups they belong to, as well as whether they are sharing their business posts onto their personal profiles.
Instagram: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Following:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Twitter: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Following:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Youtube: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Pinterest: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Following:
Notes:
Linkedin Page: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Follower
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
If the primary owners or managers have personal Linkedin accounts, I also like to take a look at them. If you don’t want accounts to know you have viewed their profile, you can go into your own personal Linkedin settings and change how you appear. Go to “Me” then “settings and privacy”. Then “Visibility” on the left side and “Visibility of your profile & network”. Next in the middle, go to “Profile viewing options”. If you select “private mode”, I recommend that you log out of Linkedin and then log back in and check. I’ve heard reports that sometimes it doesn’t take, and it is better to log back in and check to make sure before assuming.
Other Ads/Google PPC: (if you use a tool like Semrush and many others, they will tell you if comps are running ads)
Notes:
Yelp: (add the full URL)
Reviews: (number and comments)
BBB: (add the full URL)
Reviews: (number and comments)
Bing: (add the full URL)
Indeed: (add the full URL)
Employee Reviews: (number and comments)
Glassdoor: (add the full URL)
Employee Reviews: (number and comments)
Checking Employer review sites give you an excellent insight into the competition.
Sites of Interest/Linked from:
Review your comp lists every three months or optimally every month or the very most every six months. Competitors change pricing, change offerings, change services, bring on new key staff or have them leave.
If you are not looking at your competition, you can guarantee some of them are looking at you. And if you are not keeping an eye on their pricing changes or new offerings, you can lose business because you are not staying on top of it. The time spent on reviewing gathered information is well worth it.
by Heather T. | Nov 9, 2021 | Blog, Marketing, Operations, Social Media
This is an updated post on one I had done way back in 2010 (yikes it’s hard to believe that it’s been over decade, but still relevent) with bit more information and a couple of additional ideas.
I thought it might be time to update it, as it’s one of the most common questions I get from people, even when I tell them you know………. there are a ton of ideas and post ideas out there already floating around and don’t forget to look at what your competitions doing,
Sometimes people want some more specific ideas, so I thought it was time to give the post a little spiff up. I do find it kind of amusing that the old post refered to “fan pages”, Facebook’s original name for a business page.
(Keep in mind many of these could be in visual or image formats including video) Many can also be used for blog posts with some additional information and content. Visual/Image posts are best for Instagram. Linkedin business and personal pages, Facebook business pages and groups, and Twitter, it is best practice to try to share an image with text.
*Don’t forget to share links to your website often as well.
The number one mistake in using social media is forgetting to add targeted links to posts. People will not look for your website link if they don’t see it in the post itself.
If you have a product or service, you are promoting on social media make your links count. If you are talking about a particular service you offer, have the post link go to your services page where you talk more about the service, NOT to your homepage, you don’t want to make people have to hunt.
- A promotion.
a. Come and stay during the month of March and get two free ski tickets.
b. St. Patrick’s Day Special, get a complimentary green beer & popcorn with an order of bangers & mash (*must be 21) = 117 characters, still room for using a shortened link on Twitter.
c. Get double points on your Ace rewards card with every hardware purchase the first week of March.
d. With a purchase of any Don Fredo jewelry, get a free earring cleaning kit.
e. Get a full hair coloring treatment and receive a free trim.
f. At your next tire alignment, get a free oil change.
g. New accounting customers get a 10-minute free business analysis.
- A sale.
a. Thursday nights are half-price appetizers.
b. Sale though March 31 on Dunlop All-Season Radial Tires, save 20% off.
c. All Michelle Leslie tops and slacks on sale $15 off through this Sunday.
d. Stay 2 nights get the 3rd night 1/2 Off.
e. Two for one wool sock special every Saturday.
f. Mini-mart Super Gulps 99¢, 5-6 pm every Monday – Friday.
g. Photography special: Book a wedding with us and get an extra set of CD’s with your photos now through May 3.
- New products, services, specials, rebates, vouchers, offers, packages
- Recipes (recipes get one of the highest rates of pass-alongs in social media, if you are a retailer, share your Grandma’s killer brownie recipe and make it the next time you have a sale at your woodworking store. It doesn’t matter what business you are in. Also, Recipe failures with a funny story make great shared content.
- Guest, customer, or client comments or testimonials (with permission if sharing the full name).
- Your business in the news.
- Your business is getting or received an award.
- One of your employees is getting/or gotten an award, even if it’s of your creation, i.e., best salesperson of the month.
- Your area in the news.
- Promote any upcoming events. Open Houses, classes, workshops, webinars, networking, etc.
- A frequent and loyal guest, customer, or client in the news, please be aware of privacy though, depending on your business, a client may not feel comfortable with you sharing the information unless you know them well, it’s best practices to ask if it’s ok.
- Pictures of your business, interiors, exteriors, products (if applicable).
- Pictures of your employees.
- Pictures of happy guests, customers, or clients (with their permission and preferably in writing or verbally but documented).
- Area Events going on, you can also tie this into specials and promotions you are holding.
- A brief, “we get frequent questions “about” and put in answers.
- What does your business do to differentiate itself from others.
- Holiday Posts, a nice graphic or photo and a wish for a Happy Thanksgiving or other Holiday.
- You just found a new product you are using and love it, be it food or a new fabric softener or a new electric cordless drill; describe it and explain why you love it.
- Day of the Year posts. National Calendar days. May 20 is National Rescue Dog Day. It’s helpful if it ties into something related to your business. Two of your own dogs are rescues. One of your employees volunteers at the local dog shelter.
- Funny Loyal Guest, customer, or client stories. *caveat: make them funny and only funny, proof heavily to make sure they are not harmful or negative in any way. While someone may go into the wrong changing room by mistake at a store, and it may have had very amusing consequences, it raises things like, “don’t they have locks on the doors?” (even if you do and point out they didn’t lock them).
- Do some product/area/service-specific reviews. You have a couple of apple orchards nearby. Do some write-ups on the apples, do some research on types of apples, link to sources. You carry a particular line of clothing or cordless drills or snow tires; what is special/different/better/unique about them.
- A bio of your self or other owners or management.
- Bios of your staff.
- Interview customers. Keep in mind using video is always a bonus.
- Interview vendors.
- Helpful Tips: examples: restaurants; a good wine, lodging; cooking/baking tips, realtors: home buying tips, Landscapers: gardening tips, mechanics: car care tips, drycleaners: stain removal tips. For every type of business, there is always helpful information out there that someone can use.
- Industry News.
- Ask for feedback from blog readers, fans, followers, and from prior guests, customers, or clients. You just went from goose down pillows to memory foam pillows. If asking on a blog post, ask for some thoughts from people, and don’t forget to include the link to the blog article or post link when you do your next email blast. You just switched from using Redken products to Matrix Biolage in your salon. People love to be able to give feedback and asked what they think about things; this is an excellent medium for doing that, exploit it. Questions asked are great prompts, and you can get valuable information on your own business or something new you may be considering doing.
- Help wanted posts.
- Lists. List posts get high engagement. 10 of our top selling products. 12 of our favorite woodworking bloggers, 15 tips on saving money, 7 best places to go to get Sushi, etc.
- Links to resources, also great in list post format. 10 places to save money on your business insurance.
- If you are blogging, don’t forget to share your blog posts on your Facebook business page, your personal Facebook account, Facebook groups (if it’s permitted), Twitter and Linkedin personal and business pages. If blog posts have images (highly recommended), don’t forget to pin the image (with your blog post link) to Pinterest if you use it.
- Videos from Youtube, Vimeo and Tiktok.
- PSAs, especially ones that are relevant to what’s going on in the world today. Try to stay away from politics or religion.
- A Non-profit or charity you support.
- Your business contributing to the community or donating a product or service.
- A giveaway, contest or drawing. Please make sure you check each social media’s T.O.S (Terms of Service) before promoting these online, each has different requirements and disclosures.
A few ideas for Business Social Media Platform Shares
(Facebook (Personal, Business & Groups), Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin (Personal and Business)
While Instagram does have external apps to share posts, PLEASE ask permission first of the Instagram author. On Youtube, you can add videos to “Playlists”
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/57792?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
and
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/57792?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
If sharing on Facebook from a personal account, please ask permission first.
- A gorgeous photo taken of your town, your area, your state (make sure the author gets image credit, shares from a page, or their own group rather than uploading a photo are highly recommended so you don’t violate copyright.)
- A vendor or a company you buy from shares something of interest related to your product or business.
- Funny or amusing content, try to keep it clean.
- Helpful tips (not the same thing as Educational content as these are generally short form posts) from non-competitors.
- Educational content. A blog post from a Leadership expert with a little of your personal feelings about why you liked it or something that stood out about it.
by Heather T. | May 18, 2021 | Marketing
So if you are like most people, you are going “WHAT!!!!!! Facebook Just Changed our Business Pages last year!” Well, folks, Facebook changes business pages looks/formats and options actually about once a year. Sometimes the changes are small, sometimes large, but they do a major revamp approximately every three years and then do some tweaking of settings and looks.
Recently, I had gone through old PowerPoints for workshops I had taught since 2011 and I had screenshots from a decade of Facebook changes. It’s pretty interesting if you have a minute, check it out!
Last year’s change was a major one; this year’s changes are not “quite” as dramatic but do change some things of note.
There have been a few articles written about this, but not many to date, mostly because the switch over seems to be extraordinarily slow for this conversion. Of the 100+ pages, I am an admin on, only two have been switched over so far.
Roaming around on Facebook daily as I normally do for business, I’ve only come across a few other pages so far that have switched. The option to switch does not seem to be connected to the page like count.
You can’t sign up for an early switch, and if you do switch, you apparently have less than a week to decide you want to go back to the old format but no information on how long you can keep that option. Since presumably, we will have to switch over the new format eventually, that one is up to you.
Read a bit more from Facebook about the new version.
About the New Pages Experience (from Facebook) and
Introducing the New Pages Experience (from Facebook)
I do want to mention some of the significant things to note if and when you switch.
- When the option is available, an email will go out to all of the admins and anyone else holding a page role that the new option is being enabled within 3 days. You (and anyone else with any access) will also get a notification in Facebook about it. Please also see notes a few bullet points down re: admins.
- The admin controls are moving to the top (again) right under the banner image instead of on the left.
- Instead of the page administration options of Admin, Editor, Moderator, Advertiser, Analyst, and Custom, this new version only has two admin options. The two being; People with Facebook Access, and People with Task Access. Admin access has full control over everything. Task Access has almost all controls, but it’s more limited. For more specific information, visit https://www.facebook.com/business/help/582754542592549?id=418112142508425.
- Important! Please note that of the pages I admin that have moved to the new format and from several other people I have talked to with the new format. Anyone with access below Admin level with the new page switch will become a full Admin. So your former editors, moderators, advertisers etc. will have FULL access to the page. Please address that immediately, as this also means they can boot you off the page and delete your page as well.
- Page likes go away, but page followers stay.
- Your banner “appears” to be the same size as it was prior, but your profile image moves to the middle of the page and looks like it’s slightly larger than the prior version.
- The new page is basically a “public” profile and has a lot of extra options, not quite sure why a page would want to have: hobbies, sports, TV shows etc., but hey someone I “guess” will find a use for them. The worst part of this, though is there is already some confusion between personal pages and business pages, which was bad enough before, but now this makes it worse.
- A note on the prior bullet point. Currently (for most pages), we have the options of switching page templates, plus we can also hide some tabs (most notably “reviews”). The new option takes away templates. You can hide some of the new options (book etc.), but it does take away the ability to hide the reviews tab and “so far” if you had any external integrations for tabs like an email signup through Constant Contact or Mailchimp or external app application like Woobox (which can bring other social media channels into pages as tabs with other capabilities) no longer. Those options are apparently AWOL in the new version.
- Insights also has some major changes going on. The detail you get now when you check insights is being significantly slimmed down. Facebook does this when this option isn’t used much by users. While there are plenty of people that look at Insights (Facebook’s page analytics), the vast majority don’t. I know this for a fact because 1 out of every 15 people I talk to per month on average about FB business pages has ever actually looked at the Insights. Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away. I would suggest if you have any interest in tracking past posts, videos, photos, etc. in-depth, you download the variety of data available, and do a last download before switching over to the new format. You can only download the data in 3-month increments, which makes it kind of a pain, but well worth it to be able to have that information if needed.
- I’d also recommend downloading/backing up your page information. While there have (so far) been no reports of data loss or loss of other content. It doesn’t hurt to have a copy anyway….. We had written a post about this prior. Steps to Backing Up Your Personal and Business Facebook Pages.
- Some information from your “About” section does not migrate, so with the page switch you may want to review any information that you had previously, including hiding some of the tabs you might not find applicable or appropriate.
- With current pages, you go to the left and find “Pages” in the list. In the new version, You will switch between your personal profile and your page or pages on the top right, but they don’t call the new version pages anymore, it’s now profiles. (Just to confuse people even more).
- On a smart phone, when you log in to the regular Facebook app it seems to automatically bring you to the page (or in my case) one of the pages I admin, instead of my personal profile so you need to switch back to use your personal account. This may be unique to the iPhone app as I talked to one other person with an iPhone that was running into the same thing and a client with an android phone who had the switch done didn’t think it was happening to him but he is rarely on Facebook.
- This, I think currently is the most annoying thing about the switch. In order to run an ad or schedule a post, you need to switch back to your personal profile to do so. You will also administrate some things through Facebook Business Suite.
I do want to add one more thing of note that Facebook has done without apparently telling anyone. Your formerly private personal accounts (ie, personal profiles), that it used to be someone had to be logged into Facebook to see anything from your account, like your banner photo and personal photo are now public to the world, i.e. people not logged into Facebook at all.
From a business standpoint, this may be a plus; on the other hand, it does expose not just yourself but also any friends who have commented on a personal banner, it allows access (view) to their accounts and makes their comments public to the world. Clicking on the Likes/Loves does not bring someone (not logged in) to a user’s account, but a comment does.
You may also want to see what else is visible now to the whole wide world. Capture your URL, so https://www.facebook.com/yourusername and either open up an incognito window in Chrome, log out of Facebook and put the URL in, or open a browser you don’t use for Facebook and put the URL in. One of the reasons this blog post is titled Jeepers Creepers is because Facebook continues to let the world see your life, whether you want them to or not. Please do note though, there is a fairly new option on your personal profile to add a short line of text plus a website URL, this is public on your personal profile while not logged in. So take advantage of this if you own a business.
I suspect more changes are coming, and I’ll add another post as any new developments that are important for a small business to stay up on are rolled out.
by Heather T. | Apr 21, 2021 | Marketing, Operations
On the second two photos you can see a watermark, see one on the first one? No? But it “might” have a digital watermark.
As anyone who has sat in on one of my workshops or seminars and heard me stress the importance of making sure any photos you use on your website are legal, this will be preaching to the choir. If not, I want to revisit this for anyone who has not heard me rant about the importance of checking provenance.
What IS the provenance of images? Making sure you know where they came from legally.
In the last few years, I’ve lost count of the number of people who have run into copyright-related issues because they, OR their website developers, have run into an issue with copyright and photo/image usage.
If a client provides a photo to a web developer for use on the client’s website, the client is clearly at fault and needs to work with the photographer and/or agency to resolve the copyright claim.
Unfortunately, some web developers also provide stock photos (provenance unknown) for clients’ websites. The client gets hit with a copyright suit, and the web developer does not take responsibility for it, even though they were the ones who supplied the image.
A few more things to note, this can also happen when a web developer (legitimately) buys stock photos for a website. Then a client transfers the site away from the web developer to someone else and doesn’t obtain the licensing information for the photo.
Or the photo is obtained from a “free” stock photo site, and the site is not 100% safe (I’d say most of the free stock photo sites are questionable) because who knows if the photographer claiming ownership is the owner) and you also can’t see what’s called a Digimarc watermark or other types of invisible-to-the-eye watermark systems. Many copyrighted photos have tracked back to Getty Images from free stock photo sites, so I tend not to trust any of them.
I’m particularly anal-retentive about photo copyright because many, many years ago, when I was still doing website design, I obtained a photo that I thought was free and clear from what at the time was a legitimate free stock photo site and used it on a client’s website.
My client received a cease and desist letter from Getty Images, and even though we removed the photo immediately and provided documentation about where the photo was obtained, they still sent collections after her. And the collections agency was calling the inn literally every hour during the day to harass her.
I paid the fee to get it cleared up, because it was my fault for providing the image. Since then, I’ve lost count of the hundreds of people coming my way and looking for advice having run into similar problems. Either they used a copyrighted photo unknowingly or their web developer provided a photo or in a couple of cases, multiple photos and they got nabbed for it.
Very recently, a related issue came up, and this topic reared its ugly head again, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit this.
A website that myself, one of my clients and about a dozen other commercial photographers had a written agreement with an association that in order to use our photos, there were to be photo credits with links back to our websites on the website itself and this was done prior.
The website recently got redone with the new web developer not transferring any photo credits for any of the photos.
I won’t detail the issues and communication that arose from this, but my photos and my client’s photos (which was my primary concern) were removed from the new site as this issue did not get resolved to our satisfaction.
Unfortunately, dozens of other photos remain that need to be credited to the other commercial photographers. If my client had caught this before I had, he would never have reached out and tried to get this resolved; he would have just sent them a cease and desist letter/copyright infringement notice plus tacking on usage fees.
I know some of the other photographers that contributed photos, and I suspect they would and may do the same. I did my due diligence and let both the site owners and web developers know about this, which has not yet been addressed looking at the site this morning.
What bothers me most about the recent issue is that one, the web developer not only failed to transfer the photo credits in the first place. If they were on the old site (which they were) that it should be common sense/a good legal move, to move them as well.
Two, the web developer did not even bother to check the provenance of the photos.
Three, and this is a little detail from above, when asked to give photo credit, added photo credits to photos that were not the photographers, leaving the photographers open to liability for copyright infringement themselves.
For businesses, the takeaways should be:
- Know where you got your site photos. Are they documented? Are they legal? If you have photos on your site that you have had for years, and you are not sure where they came from, it doesn’t mean your safe; it just means you might not have gotten caught yet. Sometimes it can take years for a copyright issue to come up.
- If a web developer provides photos, where is the provenance for them, and will they take responsibility (they should!) if a site they developed for you gets hit with a copyright infringement claim for an image or images they provided? If they refuse to when asked about this issue (and I’d get this in writing), you need to use your judgment about whether that’s someone you want to use as a vendor.
- If you switch web developers, keep in mind you need to either get provenance of any stock photos that the prior site developer has provided for you or replace them with new ones that you know are legal.
- if you buy stock photos from a stock photo site make sure you take a screenshot of the site with the page that photo is getting purchased from including the licensing information. Document, document, document. Sometimes photographers remove their photos from stock photo sites and then do image searches or unscrupulous firms do searches for them (unknown to the photographers). If you have proof it was bought legally, your in the clear.
- If you do source photos from free stock photo sites, include the URL of the page the photo came from and screenshot and date the screen of the page it came from. This won’t protect you from one of the big stock photo companies but may help if a private photographer claims copyright.
Here are a few sites where you can do a reverse image search on your images.
https://tineye.com/
https://www.labnol.org/reverse/
https://smallseotools.com/reverse-image-search/
by Heather T. | Dec 23, 2020 | Marketing, Social Media
A common question I get from friends and clients is what happens if my business page or personal account gets deleted or I get locked out or banned from Facebook? Well in some cases it can be recovered, but in some, it can’t. Most of the concern understandably is about photos that might have been uploaded to a page or profile from a mobile phone and in many instances the copy on Facebook is the only copy.
From a business perspective, it’s not just photo loss, but what if you want to find a copy of a post from last year? Or two years ago? You can sit there for an hour plus and scroll back through all the posts in your insights, but having done that myself several times looking for past post information, set aside an extra hour (or two) to be able to find something, It’s ALOT of scrolling. Being able to download (and sort easily) that information can be very helpful.
Let’s start with the Facebook personal page, Facebook changed how you get to this option fairly recently for both profiles and pages. The last time I reviewed this was back about 3 years ago and there are some definite changes plus it’s always a good reminder.
Step one for a personal profile: Go to the top right of your Facebook account and click on the small downward-facing pyramid to “Settings & Privacy”
Step 2: Go to “Settings”
Step 3:**** Go to “Your Facebook Information” and than “Download Your Information”
****Facebook frequently changes the options (and many of the settings) in the backend of accounts without letting anyone know, I highly recommend Facebook users go and review what the options are in here at least once quarterly if not more often.
Step 4: if you have everything selected, be warned, it’s going to take a long time to process. So deselect all and than do the ones you have an interest in backing up.
You will get two emails from Facebook, the first saying it’s processing, the second will come when your Zip file is ready to be downloaded. You will also get a red notification on the page above when it’s ready. If you get the second email saying it’s ready and you still had the above page open and it says “pending” refresh the page on your browser.
For a business page:
Step 1: On the left hand side of your Business page when you are on as an admin, go to “Settings”
Step 2: On the General tab, go to the middle of the page to “Download Page” and than “edit”. When you click on that there will be another option to hit “Download Page”.
Step 3: You will get a very similar looking page to the personal profile options, but it will say “Download Page” at the top to make sure it’s being differentiated from your personal account.
I’d recommend doing this at least once per year for both personal and business at the very minimum, I do this quarterly for any accounts I admin as the last thing you want to have is information that is not recoverable in any way.
I can’t stress enough the importance of backing up not just your social media information but all of the information on your computer on a consistent basis. I’ve talked to so many businesses who say they know they should be doing it and don’t and very much regret it when their computers fail, they have a break-in and their equipment gets stolen or there is a disaster like a fire or flood. If you are on of those people who know you should be doing it, but don’t, I would ask you to ask yourself, “Can my business function and how long will it take (and can I, and my business) recover, if my information is lost, maybe irretrievably forever.
